The Sistine Chapel was smaller than I expected.
Perhaps it was all the people, heads craned at impossible angles, tripping over one another as they shuffled through the sacred space. A place tends to feel small when there is hardly any room left within it.
But while the space itself wasn’t as large as I thought it would be, the ceiling was so much more than I’d anticipated. I guess that’s why all those heads were bobbling about on jelly necks, touristy eyes desperate to drink it all in.
I don’t know what I had expected, other than a prominent placement for Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” You know the one: a very naked Adam is reaching out across space and time to touch fingertips with God masquerading as a very old and bearded man.
No one has ever mistaken me for an art expert, so I won’t pretend to be one here. But I am drawn to this painting, this moment of creation, and to the mysterious intermingling of fingertips at its center. God reaches out to imbue in his creation something sacred — namely, life itself. Adam’s own hand is quite nearly touching God’s, would that he just straighten his wrist. God is quite literally within reach. The Divine is there waiting at the tip of our fingers.
It’s a significant image and a more significant spiritual insight. I assumed this particular work would take up most of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, likely because that’s the only image I recognized. But it doesn’t. It’s not even directly centered. This reminder that God is constantly reaching out to us, constantly creating within us and that we have but to fully extend ourselves to meet our Creator, is one among many images representing a variety of biblical stories.
The Sistine Chapel was planned and executed to reveal important moments of Scripture. “The Creation of Adam” simply has accrued more cultural resonance than most of the other frescoes high above those tourist eyes. That’s why I expected it to have more prominence — in so many ways, I’m a product of the culture.
But because I walked into that small and sacred chapel expecting to see “The Creation of Adam” centered and prominent, I was that much more struck by what its off-centeredness said to me.
Here’s my takeaway: God is reaching out to us, inviting us simply to receive God’s grace and delight. But that moment of Divine encounter need not happen in some momentous way. We are often tempted to assume God is only speaking to us, is only working in us, in big, epic, life-altering ways. That might be true at times. But let’s not forget the mosaic of holy stories all around us: the quiet, the simple, the ordinary.
We need an image like “The Creation of Adam” to remind us of God’s hand extended in constant love because that same God is extending a hand in that same way, even in the moments — in the images — that don’t make God’s presence so obviously known.
It falls to us, then, to trust in that God we’ve encountered, whose hand we’ve so lightly touched. It falls to us to examine the details of our days in search of God’s extended hand. It falls to us to reach out and grasp it.
It falls to us to not grow complacent in this work.
I share with you a quote I came across from St. Francis de Sales that I think speaks to God’s invitation: “Does not all such rousing and kindling of the soul to better things come of God? Is it not all done in and for us? We are roused, but we did not rouse ourselves; the Spirit of God roused us, and to this end it moved us. … God calls us suddenly, and as it were startles us.”
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Eric A. Clayton is the award-winning author of Cannonball Moments: Telling Your Story, Deepening Your Faith and My Life with the Jedi: The Spirituality of Star Wars, an exploration of Star Wars through the lens of Ignatian spirituality (Loyola Press). He is the deputy director of communications at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. His essays on spirituality, parenting and pop culture have appeared in America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, U.S. Catholic, Busted Halo and more, and he is a regular contributor to Give Us This Day, IgnatianSpirituality.com and Dork Side of the Force, where he blogs about Star Wars. His fiction has been published by Black Hare Press, Small Wonders Magazine, Air and Nothingness Press and more. Sign up for his Substack “Story Scraps” here. He lives in Baltimore, MD with his wife, two young daughters and their cat.
